{"id":333,"date":"2012-03-08T23:27:37","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.basaltmagazine.com\/?p=333"},"modified":"2012-03-08T23:27:37","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T23:27:37","slug":"review-of-unseen-hand-by-adam-zagajewski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/2012\/03\/08\/review-of-unseen-hand-by-adam-zagajewski\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unseen Hand <\/em>by Adam Zagajewski<\/em> (translated by Clare Cavanagh)
\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux,\u00a0 2011 $23.00 (hardback
\nReviewed by James Crews<\/p>\n

 
\nIn his latest collection, Unseen Hand<\/em>, Adam Zagajewski once again interrogates the terrain of memory and aftermath, joy and pain, with his hard-won, welcome brand of ambivalence. In \u201cImprovisation,\u201d for instance, he writes: \u201cWhy lie? Rapture, after all,\/ lives only in the imagination and quickly vanishes.\u201d But then, as often happens in these poems richly layered with uncertainty and moments of quiet surprise, Zagajewski begins to doubt his own assertions:<\/p>\n

Perhaps, though, there are hidden things before us<\/em>
\nand in them sorrow blends with enthusiasm,<\/em>
\nalways, daily, like the birth of dawn<\/em>
\non the seashore . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Most readers will forever associate Zagajewski with his poem, \u201cTry to Praise the Mutilated World,\u201d reprinted and circulated after the events of 9\/11 as it seemed to offer a context, an acknowledgment that even in the midst of the brokenness of war and death, there are still some simple things we \u201cmust\u201d praise. In order to praise, however, one has to see clearly, and\u00a0 there is no question that this poet is a fierce observer of himself\u2014his mind, his past\u2014and of others as well. He wonders at times if the world has been paying enough attention as in \u201cCafe\u201d:<\/p>\n

The Soviet cosmonauts claimed they didn\u2019t find<\/em>
\nGod in outer space, but did they look?<\/em><\/p>\n

From the vantage point of what he calls the \u201cvita contemplativa\u201d (\u201cHappiness. A moment within an hour\u201d), Zagajewski also finds an intense solitude while exploring the locales of his youth\u2014his birthplace of Lvov, Poland as well as Krakow, Gilwice, Joseph Street and the River Garonne. It\u2019s a great relief to read a writer these days so unafraid of locating his poems in time and space, for to gloss over the places that have helped shape us is to risk a special kind of amnesia. And as this book moves back and forth between America and Poland, France and Germany, Zagajewski even goes so far as to include italics just after some titles, telling his readers exactly where or when (\u201cI\u2019m eight years old\u201d) a poem is occurring. In fact, before we even begin reading \u201cSilhouettes,\u201d his italics reassure us and the speaker himself, it seems\u2014\u201cMr. Sobertin, Mr. Romer\u2014They existed, they lived.<\/p>\n

Zagajewski and fellow Polish poet, Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, both employ straightforward, almost reportorial language, and they share a translator as well\u2014the wonderful Clare Cavanagh, who has lovingly ushered the poems of Unseen Hand<\/em> into crystal-clear English. But though the two poets both delight in observing others, Zagajewski shows little of Szymborska\u2019s bird\u2019s-eye-view detachment from her subjects. His is the project of re-creating the events and landmarks of his own life in order to better understand the rest of us as we go about our daily tasks:<\/p>\n

I thought that the city is built not of houses,<\/em>
\nsquares, boulevards, parks, wide streets,<\/em>
\nbut of faces gleaming like lamps,<\/em>
\nlike the torches of welders, who mend<\/em>
\nsteel in clouds of sparks at night.<\/em><\/p>\n

He knows that the personal, peculiar details of a given life complicate our relationship with the world and with those we have loved and perhaps lost. We often move so quickly from rapture to despair and back again, and if Zagajewski cannot quite tell us why, he at least tries to show us how those two seemingly opposite impulses have moved through him over the years. With \u201cSelf-Portrait in an Airplane\u201d (\u201cIn Economy Class,\u201d the italics tell us), he describes the struggle toward some inner peace \u201cin the narrow seat\u201d:<\/p>\n

I hold my head in my hands<\/em>
\nas if shielding it from annihilation.<\/em>
\nSeen from outside I doubtless<\/em>
\nseem immobile, almost dead,<\/em>
\nresigned, deserving sympathy.<\/em>
\nBut it\u2019s not so\u2014I\u2019m free,<\/em>
\nmaybe even happy.<\/em>
\nYes, I hold my heavy head<\/em>
\nin my hands,<\/em>
\nbut inside it a poem is being born.<\/em><\/p>\n

Few poets, it seems, can write so honestly (and accurately) about the act of making poems or being a poet, but Zagajewski\u2014perhaps because of his precise language and of course his experience\u2014gets away with it over and over again. In \u201cMetaphor,\u201d \u201cthe very old poet in the hotel bar\u201d lists the many ways poetry simply cannot replicate real life:<\/p>\n

\u00a0. . . the things we love, the unseen things,<\/em>
\ntake flesh, of course, in what can<\/em>
\nbe seen and said, though never<\/em>
\nabsolutely, one to one,<\/em>
\nso it follows that there\u2019s always a little too much<\/em>
\nor a little too little, the seams remain on the surface . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

Somehow, Zagajewski manages to own the artifice of the act while also taking us deeply into a moment, into the mind that fashions the moment. In \u201cWriting Poems,\u201d he shows a poet engaged with his art, feeling both joy and doubt as he finally reaches the inevitable conviction that \u201ceverything passes\u201d:<\/p>\n

Writing poems is a duel<\/em>
\nthat no one wins\u2014on one side<\/em>
\na shadow rises, massive as a mountain range<\/em>
\nviewed by a butterfly, on the other,<\/em>
\nonly brief glimpses of brightness,<\/em>
\nimages and thoughts like a match flame<\/em>
\non the night when winter is born in pain.<\/em><\/p>\n

He calls what he finds \u201cbrief glimpses of brightness,\u201d though one might argue after reading Unseen Hand<\/em>, that these \u201cglimpses\u201d are bound to endure far longer than the \u201cmatch flame\u201d that momentarily mitigates both darkness and cold. There is much pain threaded through this book too\u2014lost parents and loved ones and litanies of atrocities\u2014but within each poem is the abiding beauty of the everyday as Zagajewski mines each memory, each moment for a redemption that might last no longer than a line or two, but which conspires with humor and sadness and ecstasy to create some semblance of truth in a world ruled by \u201cunseen things\u201d we can scarcely imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski (translated by Clare Cavanagh) Farrar, Straus and Giroux,\u00a0 2011 $23.00 (hardback Reviewed by James Crews   In his latest collection, Unseen Hand, Adam Zagajewski once again interrogates the terrain of memory and aftermath, joy and pain, with his hard-won, welcome brand of ambivalence. In \u201cImprovisation,\u201d for instance, he writes: \u201cWhy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[41,51,55],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-polish-poetry","tag-the-unseen-hand","tag-zagajewski"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eou.edu\/basalt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}